Slashdot Mirror

Here are some more case mods (these are categorized as the Weirdest case mods).

The Fan Case Mod

Soviet TV Case mod

And Borg cubes, guitars, BBQ, beer cases and
toasters, Darth vader helmets and F117 flight decks

"About the only things that may still be private, are the thoughts in your own head."

Don't be to sure about that...

Neither one of those links could be considered source material for the harmful effects of this sort of tecnology. The first one reports on increased cancers at the site where RFID chips are implanted. It's not about exposure to radio energy so much as it is about having a radio receiver implanted in the body. The second one doesn't offer up any facts related to the harmfulness of wireless technology. It's purely a specultative 'what if fluff' piece. Got anything better?

http://capitalpress.com/Main.asp?SectionID=94&ArticleID=35165 http://crunchgear.com/2007/05/21/dangers-of-wi-fi-should-be-reevaluated-possibly-more-harmful-than-previosuly-indicated/ And about a zillion other articles debating the harmfulness of all the various wireless technologies. Of course you will always find a study that counters the previous one. Still, things like cellphones heating up body tissue are undebatable, long time studies aren't available for modern technologies, for obvious reasons.

The posting talks about "Steve Jobs' recent announcement of his intention to fight off the independent iPhone developers..."

This is incorrect. Jobs only said they have to fight the unlock. The actual quote of what he said is,

Q: What are you going to do about iPhone unlocking?

Steve: This is a constant cat and mouse game. We play it on iPods with DRM. We promised music companies to stay ahead of this problem. We try to stay a step ahead. It's going to be the same way here with the iPhone. It's our job to keep them from breaking in. That's job security.

FM transmitters are not ipod integration.

Even those cluzy ipod adapters you can use that makes your ipod/generic mp3 player behave like a clunky cd changer aren't ipod integration.

This:
http://crunchgear.com/2007/04/18/alpines-ida-x001-ipod-deck-available-early/

is ipod integration. Nothing else, for any other device comes even within shooting distance. I bought one this spring. I was hesitant because it didn't have a CD player, but I haven't missed it.

real speed access to playlists, album art, browse by song, artist, genre, the works. The only thing it doesn't do is video. And frankly, I don't think that's a loss on a 2" screen in a car where I should be looking at the road anyway.

No thanks, but I will take this

I'm sorry, but games drive console sales, not brand names. The number of consoles currently in the marketplace drive the platforms that developers target. You only need to look at what the CEO of EA said to realize that. When you have the top dog of the single largest game publisher coming straight out and saying that your console was the "wrong horse," you are in some serious trouble.

The PS2 was a huge hit because they got to market early and were able to get a snowball effect going. Developers targeted the PS2 because it was the most widely-sold console, and that in turn drove additional console sales. The PS3 will not come anywhere close to experiencing that level of success. It appeared too late, it cost too much, and they've been bleeding third-party exclusive titles at a phenomenal rate as a result. They're experiencing a slight uptick in sales thanks to the (maybe temporary) price cut, but the only numbers developers and publishers are looking at are total number of consoles sold, and the weekly numbers are only a drop in the bucket compared to those totals.

Thanks to http://vgchartz.com/, we know that there are 10.5 million 360s, 10.5 willion Wiis, and only 4.3 million PS3s sold worldwide. What 3rd-party developer in their right mind is going to drop serious money on developing a AAA title if they can only sell it to 17% of the next-gen market? Without exclusive AAA third-party titles, there's pretty much no chance of a major increase in the rate of PS3 console sales. You only have to look at Nintendo's experience with the GameCube to realize that all the first-party titles in the world just aren't enough to get the job done.

As for Microsoft "flunking" in Europe, the weekly numbers may look a little rosy (or at least not dismal) for the PS3, but the 360 is still the most widely sold console in the "other" (i.e. not North America or Japan) category by a fair margin at 3.3 million, which is mostly Europe. The Wii is second with 2.8 million, and the PS3 hardly even rates with 1.3 million. The PS3 outsold the 360 by a whole 6000 units in Europe for the week ending August 19th. That's simply nowhere close to enough to erase the 2 million lead the 360 has. At a rate of 6000 more consoles sold per week, it would take the PS3 seven years to catch the 360 in Europe. For the same week though, the Wii stomped them both, selling almost twice as much as the 360 and PS3 combined.

As for Japan, MS completely botched the 360 marketing plan there, without question. You can Google for Japanese reactions to the 360's "Do Do Do" campaign, if you'd like a laugh. However, while the 360's failure to crack the Japanese market is bad news for MS, it isn't automatically good news for Sony. Japan was supposed to be Sony's stronghold, and look at the Japanese sales numbers: 3.4 million units for the Wii, and only 1.1 million for the PS3. Even in their own backyard, Sony is getting their asses handed to them.

"It should be obvious where all of those former PS2 users are going to end up over the next five years."

Yes, it is obvious to me, though apparently not to you: wherever the games are. Where are the games going to appear? This is also obvious: on whatever consoles are most common. Whether that's more frequently the 360 or the Wii depends on how things shake out this Xmas, but at this point the PS3 is simply too far behind to have much hope of making a comeback.

They can work as entry-level green (as in low-power) PCs. Everex came out with one recently. If you want a low-noise PC with more power, maybe one built around a mobile processor would be appropriate.

True, inspiration can hit in two places at once.

What I said was, Some have said that Apple "ripped off" LG's touch screen phone.

That would include LG's head of handset R&D, http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/12/lg-says-apple-cop ied-prada-phone/

Coming soon to a Zune near you:

http://crunchgear.com/2006/11/29/rockbox-for-zune- coming-soon/

If anyone knows what the Gigabeat is, its the Toshiba MP3 player running Windows Media Center Mobile, of which the Zune is a hack.

Works on the Gigabeat so only a matter of time before it runs on Zune. I have to admit I'd never heard of Rockbox. I really like the screenshots. Hope it doesn't screw up the video.

with apologies to Fark, I'm sure:

"WSJ Discovers Twitter, Buttocks in Dark Sans Flashlight"

link: http://crunchgear.com/2007/03/16/wsj-discovers-twi tter-buttocks-in-dark-sans-flashlight/

Acutally, all formats may be in danger. The Alcatel-Lucent-Bell Labs patent is very generic and can theoretically be applied to all digital audio formats.

http://crunchgear.com/2007/02/24/patent-monkey-det ails-on-alcatels-15-b-win-against-microsoft/

See this article also on Crunchgear. Microsoft filed patent applications for a wireless cellphone rich media device in 2005, chances are they DO have something in development.

About 20 mins later crunch gear posted this article as well, which features a links to the Patent Applications they filed a few years ago, as well as a VERY interesting link to M$'s entire patent portfolio (5800+ patents !!)

Link to the Article on CrunchGear.

Its interesting to see that Microsoft was thinking about this a few years ago long before Apple announced their I-phone.

I'd love for a small Taiwanese company to make a peice of hardware that *just works*, is multifunctional, unencumbered, and relatively inexpensive. The problem is, it is really tough to do. This kind of thing is still in the realm of IT professionals and enthusiasts, because it is hard.

Forcing users to stream wmv, mp4 or whatever is a lock-in tactic, I won't debate that, but it does make a lot of other things easier. Everything from a bad MPEG header, to higher than normal latency will break an app like this. I'm on the VLC Streaming list, and really smart competent people come with problems of this sort all of the time. VLC is great, and has been around for a long time, but we can't get it right either.

I work for a small software company, when we sell software a server goes with it. It is necessary for what we are doing, but it is a huge pain in the rear. Half of the time you can't get anyone competent to ask about their network setup (even to get something as trivial as a static IP or proxy exception), and when you do half of the time they don't know what is going on. I hear lines like "I didn't set this up, I don't know" and "well I don't know what the heck that does" all the time in server rooms. My point is this--if companies and schools can't keep their networks straight, a home user can't either. I know home networks are much less complex, but if you add a server that handles phones, TV, music, and who knows what else, it is going to get a lot more complex.

And without guidance to their network you'd have to have one heck of a product to have it *just work*. And the networking is just half of it, you also have to get an easy-to-use, cross-platform, nice looking, reliable desktop app to couple with the set up.

Unless this company does a really good job like Tivo or get bought up by *a large well known tech company*, I don't think the general public would buy it because of name recognition. But more importantly, I think this kind of thing is really hard to get right. The Windows Home Server seems to be the closest thing to a consumer server out there, but without an XBOX 360, this still won't hook up to your TV. To add games, music, VOIP capability (I have a Vonage phone and I occasionally have trouble with it) and whatever else, seems to be beyond anyone's current capability.

I have trouble viewing "cyberframing" as much of a threat. Most people have enough sense to double check stuff that's that damaging in person. How often do people end long term relationships with one-line emails and NO other clues (including silence)?
I have the feeling that a law like this in the US would cause a dramatic upswing in the number of Napoleons Bonapartes and George Washingtons.
Also, after reading this you'd wanna think a law like this through a little more.

If you get one of Apple's lemons, like the reporter who shamed Apple into upping the limit from three to five, you can go through ten system disks about as fast as you can ship laptops back to Apple.

As I said, I think this is a possible scenario, albeit a rather unlikely one.

I'm a Mac user who uses multiple online retailers. So I guess it must be possible.

I'm guessing that you either don't listen to music from major labels, or you use allofmp3, which seems to be going away in its current form. I would guess that most people do want music from mainstream bands, and don't want to use a somewhat illegal russian music store.

Howeverit's actually *easier* to make portable offsite backups of plain-old-CDs than to make portable offsite backups of iTunes purchases, because the nudge-nudge-wink-wink-approved approach to doing the latter involved creating plain-old-CDs as an intermediate step. :)

There are cases where it's easier - if the CD isn't copy-protected, you can rip the CD and store it somewhere else, and you're done.

Backing up iTunes songs isn't exactly hard, though. If you've got a working backup strategy, your iTunes songs are backed up automatically. If you don't, writing them to an Audio disc and storing that offsite is a bit more work than just ripping a CD, but not that much more.

and it seems it's still making trouble to the windows media servers